Stanford in Nanalan'
by albinotanuki
Summary: During Stanford's travel through the Multiverse, he comes across the world of Nanalan' and decides to record his studies on a little girl named Mona.


I have come into a new dimension. It has no number, but from what I've gathered from the inhabitants of this world, they seem to refer to it as "Nanalan'".

Nanalan' is a strange place indeed. Everything was bright and colorful with everything having a texture of felt and foam as well as just about anything that moved was attached to some plastic dowels. The sentient beings too are strange creatures, with nothing but black pupils for eyes and strange colored skin; if I hadn't felt like a freak before with my six fingers in my old home dimension, I certainly felt like one here with everyone else having four fingers on each hand and three toes on each foot.

I have befriended three individuals of this world. Nana, an elderly woman with orange skin who's rather senile and, from the looks of her face, probably had a stroke at some time in her life, Russel, what appears to be a Jack Russel Terrier who does basically everything any normal dog would do, and Mona, Nana's 3 year old granddaughter who's wildly imaginative, is enamored with everything she sees, and has a slight speech impediment that makes it hard to understand half of what she's saying.

Mona often visits her grandmother and plays in the backyard with Russel. Of all the creatures I've seen through my travels, Mona was the most fascinating I've come across as I have decided to record my studies of her (Plus, with Nana often not supervising Mona while she played, I ended up having to do most of the babysitting while Nana was in the house doing God knows what).

Mona would have regular conversations with Russel as if he were a... person like her, and Russel for the most part seemed to understand what it was she was saying. That at least makes one of us; I usually can't understand half of what Mona is saying and I end up having to nod at everything she says without me knowing one word she's said.

Like any little girl from my dimension, Mona loves to play. She would often play with Russel in the backyard, teaching the dog the names of vegetables growing in the garden and dressing up in ghost costumes, scaring her grandmother with the most terrifying laugh I've ever heard from a child.

I often worried about Mona's health. I often caught her smelling flowers she was allergic to just so she could sneeze (which she found to be funny for some reason), taunting snakes the garden, and I once caught her diving head first into a shallow blow-up pool when Nana wasn't looking. When she got hit on the head with a walnut, she started crying as if she were in great pain (on further inspection, I noticed her head was rather soft; perhaps the fontanelle in her cranium never quite fully fused). Mona also loved putting things in her mouth. I saw her once try putting a lollipop in her mouth that was about as big as her head. I also had to take away a balloon she was trying to blow up to prevent her from choking on it.

There was something odd about Mona. Her dilated pupils, strange cravings, constant laughter, fascination in the seemingly mundane all seemed very similar to symptoms of exposure to Tetrahydrocannabinol: the substance found in marijuana that makes people "high". I tried testing whatever Mona was exposed to, from various plants, to the food Nana prepared for her, but I could find any traces of THC or any other kind of drug. Perhaps children of her species are just...weird like that.

Even with Mona's eccentricities, speech impediment, and hyperactivities, she's proven to not only be curious about everything, but also quite intelligent. She knows how to feed Nana's pet fish (which I assume fish in this dimension eat flakes made of gold) and has already grasped the concept of death when she encountered a flower drooping. It seems Mona's thoughts are much deeper than I could ever imagine.

I had to leave Nanalan'; Bill is on my trail and I can't let Mona and her family get hurt. If I were to have any nieces or nephews back in my home world, I hope they would be as entertaining as Mona was (and less danger prone).


End file.
